I am immediately star-struck when New York Times bestselling fantasy author V.E. Schwab logs onto our Zoom call. She greets me fresh from a walk with her dog in a casual, black hoodie, her bright-red hair and red glasses making a striking contrast.
 

A former astrophysics major before turning to literature in college, Schwab wrote two books before graduating; the second one sold to Disney. More recently, Netflix produced the series “First Kill” based on one of her short stories as her other books climbed bestseller lists.
 

Schwab, who has a playful social media presence, is warm and friendly, even over an online call between West Virginia and her chosen home of Portobello, Scotland, a quaint seaside town just outside of Edinburgh.
 

Exchanging pleasantries, Schwab exudes confidence mixed with sincerity. She immediately drew me in. I expected nothing less from the 35-year-old, award-winning author who has published over 20 books.
 

What I didn’t expect was how her books make space for diverse characters to exist or how her stories challenge gender stereotypes, including questions of masculinity, femininity, and the empowerment of women. Her books aren’t about those topics, but they are a part of the fabric of her literary world.
 

Expect the unexpected when you open one of Schwab’s books. They are magical, filled with richly woven, wondrous ideas. Schwab says writing her ideas into a book is like using ingredients in a recipe. It turns out, her writing philosophy is a recipe for life.
 

I was so excited about meeting Schwab that I didn’t know where to start.
 

“If my children had any idea we were talking today, I assure you, there’d be a gaggle of teens behind me cheering wildly,” I share with Schwab, who smiles broadly. I don’t mention it, but I am pretty sure there would be a bevy of adults, too. Schwab writes fantasy books for children, teens, and adults alike including six adult titles, over a dozen YA and middle-grade books, and some comics and short stories.
 

All ages will get their chance to see Schwab soon enough. She is speaking at the West Virginia Book Festival on Saturday, Oct. 22, with a book signing to follow.

Fantasy isn’t a genre I typically reach for, but after reading Schwab’s international bestseller, “The Invisible Life of Addie Larue,” about a young French woman who makes a Faustian bargain that makes her immortal but forgotten by everyone she meets, I am sold. Not so much on the genre, as on Schwab and her beautiful, thought-provoking prose. The book skyrocketed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, where it remained for 37 weeks.
 

Schwab’s writing style has an economy that belies the beautiful imagery and fierce emotion in her books. The worlds Schwab creates feel real. Some are modern-day, set in our regular world but with a magical twist. They are populated with characters you can’t help but feel you know and care about. But what keeps me turning pages are the questions of “what if ...? what if ...?”
 

“To me, the great question as a writer is ‘what if?’” says Schwab, who considers herself more of a storyteller than an author. “What if violence began to breed actual monsters? What if you did a deal with the devil and he cursed you to be forgotten?

“Each one [of those what ifs] is, at its core, just about people, and what it means to be moving through the world as a human,” Schwab notes. “But I like to couch it in the fantastical, because that’s what I want to read, it’s what I want to live, you know.”
 

Nature and nurture

The “what if?” questions that propel Schwab’s plots might also be the best way to describe the prolific young author, who, as a former astrophysics major in college, dared to challenge herself to write an entire book.
 

As an only child, Schwab says, she grew up with “both the weight of my parents’ love and the weight of their expectation.” Schwab’s parents nurtured her with poems as a child. She wasn’t a big reader but found poems manageable due to their size.
 

“By the time I was 7 or 8, my brain worked naturally in iambic pentameter,” she says with a chuckle. “I could just, think in poem ... it just informed this kind of natural cadence that lived in my head. I fed myself on poems.”

 

Schwab was raised with an expectation to reach her goals. “My parents supported me as long as I had a plan,” she says. Naturally competitive, Schwab became a nationally ranked fencer in high school after becoming entranced with the fictional Spanish fencer, Inigo Montoya, portrayed in Rob Reiner’s classic 1980s movie, “The Princess Bride.” “I went to my mom and I said, I want to be a fencer, and she said ... if you can prove you care about it, sure, you can take a lesson. I always had to prove that it wasn’t just a kind of dream. I always had to have, like, a game plan with everything that I did.” Her parents’ insistence on supporting her endeavors when she took them seriously fed Schwab’s competitive nature, she says.
 

How did a woman who excels in math and science and grew up with an affinity for poetry become a bestselling novelist? First, she tried everything but writing a book. “I am very daunted by the idea of keeping a novel’s worth of story in my head, and so I actually tried everything else. I started in poetry. I did screenwriting, I did short stories, I did narrative nonfiction,” she explains. “I realized that the only reason I wasn’t writing a novel was because I was afraid of failing to write a novel. I have this very adversarial nature when it comes to fear. And so I sat down as a sophomore in a coffee shop one night, and I wrote my first novel.”
 

The novel was terrible, Schwab says, but finishing it offered a valuable lesson. “Getting to the end of it, realizing that I could do that, that I could complete something, was the greatest feeling I had ever had. That ... was proof enough to myself that I was capable of it,” she says.
 

A change of scenery

Schwab attended a rigorous, all-girls preparatory high school in Nashville, Tennessee, before attending Washington University in St. Louis, where she earned a bachelor’s of fine arts in communication design with a minor in creative writing. She has a master’s of science in medieval art history from the University of Edinburgh, where she moved at age 23.
 

Having just visited Edinburgh recently myself, I can attest that it is perfectly suited for Schwab’s creative energy. Edinburgh is, in many ways, from another time and place. At its heart exists an original medieval-style village. Edinburgh Castle looms over one end of the city, and Holyrood House Palace at the other, situated on the ocean. In between are twisty, cobbled streets lined with cozy pubs, enchanting alleys and ancient graveyards. Allegedly, it is the city from which much of the landscape from JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series is drawn. Speaking with Schwab from her home in picturesque Portobello, a seaside town near Edinburgh, the appeal is obvious for a writer whose works tend toward the spooky and supernatural.
 

Ideas for her books come from varied sources, and some of them percolate inside her head for many years. She tells me her mind works like a six-burner stove. “Whatever I’m writing right now is on high heat on one burner. The other five burners have things on really low heat,” she says. Her ideas are like ingredients that come together to make a complete dish.
 

The idea for “The Invisible Life of Addie Larue” came from several ingredients: Schwab’s fascination with Faustian bargains, her interest in objets d’art, and observing her mother being forgotten by a grandmother plagued with dementia.

 

Schwab knew the worth of her voice early on. She arrived at college ready to learn and be heard. “I got to college and looked around at all of the other girls who didn’t raise their hands, because they didn’t want to look foolish, or they didn’t want to stand out. And that had never occurred to me; I was groomed to believe that I was capable of doing something if I worked hard enough at it,” she says.

“There’s a kind of narcissism required to be a novelist; you have to believe that you’re worth being read. You have to believe that you have stories that are worth being read,” she says.
 

Representation matters

Schwab not only speaks up for herself, but she also speaks up for others by writing diverse characters. Her books weave in LGBTQ+ characters in a way that doesn’t feel token or centered on sexuality alone.
 

Growing up, Schwab says, she did not see queer characters in literature. “I didn’t need a coming-out story, but I needed queer-existence stories,” she says. Her books are an all-too-rare gift for readers who don’t normally see themselves reflected in popular culture. They are a gift, too, for the way they normalize diverse characters for an audience who might not otherwise know or understand.

Schwab also subverts typical roles. You won’t find a damsel in distress, here.
 

“A lot of what I am doing is trying to upend the tropes of the gender binary,” she explains. “I want queer characters taking up space ... . I want my femme-presenting characters, my women to be ambitious and hungry and angry, and I want my male characters and masculine-presenting characters to have emotions and actually be cued into them,” she says. “If you think about it, books become an empathy engine. They become places where we encounter these concepts and where they can help to be normalized if you’re not part of that community. And if you are part of that community, you get to be seen not on the periphery, but in the center,” she adds.
 

Bias is something Schwab is used to dealing with in the often sexist world of publishing, where she uses her initials, V.E., in part to neutralize her gender. “I can’t tell you the number of times I ... had a reader come up to me ... and say, ‘I’m so glad I didn’t know you were a woman, I never would have picked this up,’” she says. “I’d rather you pick up my book and read it and then have to deal with whatever conception is your bias than to not pick up my book in the first place because of my name on the cover.”
 

The types of characters that populate Schwab’s books give her a chance to explore theories that interest her. “I’m really, really interested in the concept of humanity and monstrosity — specifically, the idea that humans tend to be the most monstrous and monsters are capable of being the most human,” she says. “I tend to make my humans behave monstrously whenever there are real monsters in the book for contrast,” she adds. “I’m also just really interested in loneliness and anger and ambition. I specifically am interested in these things when they apply to female or femme-presenting characters because historically when women were given power in stories — on the rare occasion they were made powerful — they were also expected to be selfless and self-sacrificing. And I take extreme issue with this. Because, you know, when I was a teenager, I would have burned the world down to be happy. As an adult, I still feel like I would, too. But there’s still this societal expectation that a woman must be passive.”
 

What if? is a question that propels Schwab’s plots, but those words also echo to me her writing philosophy and personal convictions. Her belief in a nonbinary world in which individuals are nothing more than themselves, rather than prescribed stereotypes.

 

What if? These are words to live by. Schwab may have penned the “Invisible Life of Addie Larue,” but her own existence is visible. And it’s filled with unlimited possibilities.